She Who Won't Be Obeyed

By Wendy Steiner

Published: January 23, 2000

UNDUE INFLUENCE

By Anita Brookner.

231 pp. New York:

Random House. $24.

''UNDUE INFLUENCE'' is the 19th of Anita Brookner's dejected novels. For those repelled by her desiring, disappointed heroines, it might be well to consider an alternative: the central character in ''Funny Face.'' Remember Audrey Hepburn, a bookstore clerk in awe of a professor of Empathicalism who is remade into a high-fashion model in love with a photographer, played by Fred Astaire? She dances; she sings; she models; she charms. She does not worry much, except about the Empathicalist guru and the dishy photographer. ''You're so happy,'' Fred instructs her from behind his viewfinder. ''Now you're not happy.'' ''Now you're in love.'' And then he pauses in mid-sashay, as if the picture has leapt into focus: why, she's a real woman and, by gum, he loves her -- madly, jealously. What is this Empathicalist nonsense? Fred knows that men act empathetic for just one reason, and indeed the professor turns out to be more a man than an Empathicalist. Audrey has already walked down the runway wearing a wedding gown; now she need only outwait Fred's dithering to wear it down the aisle.

Brookner's narrator, Claire Pitt, is in no danger of imagining men as empathetic, but neither does she dance, sing, model, charm or marry. She interprets. ''I know those unconscious gestures,'' she boasts. ''I can read them like a book.'' Like Audrey, she works in a bookshop, but it is a reticent customer, Martin Gibson, whom she wishes to read: ''I prefer the living flesh and its ambiguity. I am in my element there, a hunger artist whose hunger is rarely satisfied.'' Unfortunately, Claire is hungry for more than observation. She yearns to be the object of Martin's scrutiny, a funny face in his viewfinder. Though she affects the brave independence of a Baudelairean flneuse, taking solitary rambles through London, she is distressed that ''all my activity has been forced upwards, into my head.'' More and more, she finds unsatisfactory an ''untenanted life, with only an aberrant imagination for company.''

Claire is editing the notebooks of the defunct owner of the bookshop, who used to wander about the city too, collecting material for his never-realized memoir, ''Walks With Myself.'' He may have walked with himself, but his walks ended up with a woman not his wife. Men are always like that, Claire finds. Her father, in a fatal coma, was found fiddling with himself under the bedsheets. ''I was glad when he died,'' she tells us, not shrinking from the hard truth.

Knowing, dutiful women and cheating, immature men: how can this still be the way of the world at the end of the 20th century? Claire wonders. It is not her way, for she is a new woman. She has taken ''buccaneering'' trips to French cathedral towns, engaging in ''less than ecclesiastical behavior.'' But buccaneering has lost its appeal, and Claire decides to use her empathetic powers to maneuver Martin into marriage. She cooks him dinner, suffers through his self-obsessed monologues and parlays him into bed, surprised that he is not more grateful. In an imaginary conversation she reveals his problem: ''You are not a whole human being. You lack empathy.'' Maybe this is part of his attraction: even from the start, Martin struck her as ''a man who was not quite a man.'' ''There was something chaste about the man that excited my worst instincts.''

When Claire's invitation to dinner produces no sign of pleasure on Martin's part, she concludes that ''he did not know the correct formulae for expressing anticipation. It was therefore up to me to ambush him. He preferred it this way. I did this without prejudice. After all, I was in control.'' Eager to display her virtues, Claire makes a point of protecting him from ''a falsely flattering view of himself'' and awakening him to ''the pleasure of slipping below his own knightly standards.'' ''I made a man of him,'' she brags. But, strangely, ''for none of this did he thank me.''

One does not have to be an Empathicalist to know how this will end, though Brookner sets up the circumstances of Claire's comeuppance as if they should surprise not only her heroine but her readers. Far be it from me to spill the entirely predictable beans (in this case, mangoes); it is enough to say that Claire discovers that in life as well as in dreams ''it is impossible to consider oneself the prime mover.''

Showing pride fall is tricky when Satan is a first-person narrator who reads the world as a second-rate book. The ''undue influence'' Claire tried and failed to exert over Martin is too much like her creator's attempt to control the reader -- both of them are cynical women with overstrained imaginations. Thus Brookner tries to save Claire from humorless megalomania by giving her the grace to admit her errors and by filling her confusion with a certain feminist pathos. Claire understands sadness, at least in other women: ''There is no consolation for those who have missed their chance.'' She even has the answer to Freud's query about what women want, which she states with some eloquence: ''Ardor, an erotic eagerness that goes beyond the physical. The desire and pursuit of the whole. And also an unmasking, so that it will become possible to meet on every level.'' A heroine who can articulate such aspirations is not to be despised, and on occasion the reader is moved to compassion.

UNFORTUNATELY, though, Claire is repellently mean-spirited. She mistakes interpretation for love, believing the effort she expends on reading other people is a compliment they are too dimwitted to return. Here the reader feels distinctly uneasy. An author hiding behind a first-person narrator is all-powerful and at the same time blameless, depicting an ugly reality under the blind of another's flawed consciousness.

When Henry James shows us the world through such a character, the reader is rewarded with an extraordinarily subtle interpretive challenge. But here we have only confusion and authorial disguise. If Brookner thinks we will be surprised at the novel's ending, she shows us as little respect as Claire does for Martin; if not, she gives us a narrator unworthy of our respect. Or perhaps we are just too cowardly to face life's cruelty, imagining ourselves as noble knights or funny faces rejecting bogus empathy for real love. What disappointments we are! But then, as Claire shows us, those who tell hard truths may be incapable of seeing any truth at all.

Wendy Steiner, director of the Penn Humanities Forum and Richard L. Fisher professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is completing a book called ''The Trouble With Beauty.''